In this blog, I will be writing about aspects of Enterprise Architecture that straddle the boundary between the business and the technology realms.
The views that I express on here are mine. They aren't filtered, controlled, managed, refined, doctored, censored, or intended to represent any views that my employer has.

Saturday, February 15, 2014

This post comes out of some work that I am doing with a client. Getting to the essence of event processing and what needs to be in place.
As many have observed, the metadata is often as interesting to the enterprise as the actual data. The trouble is that the enterprise doesn't necessarily know ahead of time what may or may not be interesting. perhaps applications that manage the state of domain objects should tell the world when they have changed the state of a domain object that they manage.
It is only when applications start bragging about what they have done that the enterprise has the ability to draw conclusions that range across the domains.
So while the current state of an interesting domain object may well be locked up in a transactional database somewhere, that the state change occurred could (and should) be made available to any/all interested parties.
Let's think in terms of an intelligent (but fictitious) home environment that we will call the IHE.
Our daily activities in the house include:

Using hot water

Turning lights on and off

Accessing computers

Watching TV

Sleeping

Opening/closing the refrigerator

Cooking

Eating

Managing the trash

Managing the recycling

Filling the dishwasher

Dressing

Doing (or having done) the laundry

Opening/Closing exterior doors

...

I have this feeling that my home bills are too high, so it might be interesting to see if any of my activities are inefficient (I leave lights on sometimes - so we have an event, followed by a negative event), if some of my activities can be co-related. Perhaps a change in one suggests an opposite direction change in another.

Now if, hypothetically, all my activities resulted in events being notified and somehow analyzed, then perhaps (and this is a big perhaps) I have the opportunity to look at my patterns and make some changes that result in savings in time, energy or general annoyance.

Of course we do the obvious ones. When we sleep, running the dishwasher is a no-brainer. But what about multiple uses of the oven? What about leaving lights on? What about leaving doors/windows open correlated with when the heating/cooling are running.

The point is that all of these state changes describe the minutiae of my life and I don't have the time, not the energy to capture them. That detail should be captured at the time it happens - if I am truly interested. It shouldn't wait until after the event when my recollection is hopelessly flawed.